It’s another day in the kitchen of Andy Polizzi — volunteer firefighter, auto salvage manager and father of Nicole Polizzi, the 4-foot-9-inch Snooki, yowling star of “Jersey Shore” — and words cannot hurt him. Sticks and stones! After a season of the hit reality show about a bunch of Italian-Americans sharing a beach house, Andy is used to the terrible stuff that people say about his little girl, and if he had to, he looks built enough under his “Papa Snooks” T-shirt to take them down.

He has welcomed a reporter into his home, a ranch in the middle of the ranchlands and big riding-tractor front lawns of Marlboro, N.Y., across the river from Poughkeepsie, amid the orchards and dairy bars off Route 9W. There’s a swimming pool in the backyard stuffed with water toys and surrounded by a chain-link fence. Inside, the house has the snug plenitude of a man who likes his comforts close at hand. He has been divorced 10 years.

But he has to be honest, he said, folding his arms on the kitchen table: He doesn’t understand the public’s fascination with his daughter.

“When we go to venues, I like to stand out in the crowd,” he said. “She’ll be up there hooting and hollering, and I’ll say to someone, ‘What is it that draws you to my daughter? Be honest.’ Because it’s very hard for me to see what it is. She don’t sing. She don’t dance. I don’t want to say she don’t have talent ...” He seemed to have his doubts. Then he shrugged. “Everyone basically says they can relate to her. I think Nicole’s just a likeable person.”

He went along in this worn rut of relatedness and just-folks-like-us celebrity bunkum — for, alas, fame has come to him, too — and then, hearing his daughter coming noisily down the hall from the garage, he said quickly, “Let me ask you: What do you think of the show and what do you think of Nicole?”

Ah.

Everybody seems to have an opinion about “Jersey Shore,” which begins its second season on MTV on Thursday night. Italian-American groups hate it because the cast members — Snooki, Mike (The Situation), Jenni (JWoww), Pauly D and the rest — are into “Guidos” and “Guidettes,” and how much gel they can pump into their hair before they make the chicken parm. In the first episode, Snooki got drunk, threw up and passed out.

The obsession about tanning and the gym has led to parodies on YouTube. Even President Obama has weighed in on Snooki’s scarily dark tan, referring to it because of a proposed tanning-bed tax. Senator John McCain Twittered her. (“I do rec wearing sunscreen!”)

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HER WAY Snooki at home in Marlboro, N.Y., with her father, Andy Polizzi, who tells her, “You are you.”Credit
Michael Falco for The New York Times

The action takes place in Seaside Heights and, at least for part of the new season, in South Beach. Since the show’s personalities are painted with broad strokes (the better for the rest of us to mock them), you accept that the housemates have no other aim than partying and avoiding a “grenade” in the hot tub (the guys’ term for an ugly chick). Clearly the series relies on the chem-lab formula used by other reality shows, in which volatile and juvenile temperaments are thrown together for fun explosions.

Yet while such behavioral snippets compelled some 4.8 million people to watch “Jersey Shore” at the end of the first season — almost triple the number of viewers for the premiere last December — the main point of outrage on blogs is that the show has absolutely no redeeming value.

“The adventures of the most irrelevant people on earth,” as someone wrote recently on a gossip blog. And even viewers who claim to love “Jersey Shore” usually find it hard to say why.

“Everything about this show is super-sized — from the over-the-top hair to the over-the-top nature of the comments,” said Robert J. Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University. If you can’t tell, he’s an avid fan. “ ‘Jersey Shore’ is brilliantly cast and, of course, Snooki is the star,” he said. “The name doesn’t hurt for a start.”

That Snooki is not conventionally attractive — “A spray-painted Chihuahua,” Mike (The Situation) said when he first saw her — has a lot to do with why she is the breakout member of the cast. She is busty and short-waisted with small legs; sort of like a turnip turned on its tip. There is the weird tan, but the pièce de résistance of Snookiness is the half-doughnut-shaped pouf on top of her head.

The pouf has been her signature, along with her frisky nickname, since she was in high school in Marlboro, where she was a cheerleader. “The pouf is like a Guidette thing, and usually on teen night all the girls did it,” she explained when I first met her, in May, in South Beach. “Eventually all my friends grew out of it and went to straight hair.”

With a blank look, she shrugged. “Me, I like the pouf. I’m still going to rock it.”

Snooki has a way of putting herself together that while in some ways is atrocious, is completely identifiable to her and consistent with her attention-seeking personality. She wears short, clingy dresses in a pattern or with some metallic trim, huge enameled or bejeweled hoop earrings and glittery high heels.

Lots of 22-year-old women wear revealing clothes, but they may not have her body shape, and it’s a safe bet they’re not rocking a pouf. Though that may change when a line of Snooki hair products comes out. Anyway, the effect has been interesting. “If you were to draw a cartoon of her, you would know immediately who she is,” said Chris Linn, the executive vice president for pilots at MTV. “She’s an icon.”

But trying to hold a conversation with Snooki is a little like getting down on your hands and knees with a child. You have to come down to her level, and sometimes you almost think you need to bribe her with a piece of candy to coax her to be more responsive. She is really only responsive to her own immediate needs and desires. She is not self-centered, but she is used to acting out and getting away with it.

“She loves to be the center of attention,” said Stephanie Greiner, a friend since childhood, who lives in Marlboro. “Nicole was also kind of a mean girl in high school. She was the boss of everybody.”

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At the same time, she doesn’t exhibit normal levels of self-control for a woman her age. Her father, referring to her antics on “Jersey Shore,” said, “It’s not an act she’s putting on,” and as if to prove that, he described a recent visit by Snooki to his office: “Instead of standing at the counter and saying, ‘Can I speak to my father?’ she walks in and goes, ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ And people are looking at her. It’s not an act. It’s just the way she is.”

Not surprisingly, Snooki is an only child, adopted when 6 months old (she was born in Santiago, Chile). Her parents do everything for her — her laundry, her cooking — just as they did when she was a community college student studying to be a veterinary technician and living at home. She saw a Facebook ad for the MTV show and auditioned. “They were calling out Guidos and Guidettes, and I thought, Hello!” Snooki said on the Miami set. “So I went and I auditioned and here I am.”

Today she has 300,000 followers on Twitter but no idea how much money she has. “Not a clue,” said her dad, who handles her finances and deals with her manager, Scott Talarico of Neon Entertainment in Buffalo. (According to published reports, the cast members each received $10,000 an episode and are expected to get $30,000 an episode in the third season.)

When I was in South Beach, I spoke to the producer, Sally Ann Salsano, a veteran of reality television and the head of 495 Productions, as well as the show’s den mother. Talking to Ms. Salsano, who is from Farmingdale, on Long Island, made me more sympathetic about the cast.

“I was that girl, just like them, who had lived at home until I was 25,” Ms. Salsano said. “It’s that East Coast mentality. It’s the Italian upbringing — why would you leave? It’s so good here. My brother lived at home until he was 32, when he got married. In a twin bed in his room. To us, it’s not weird.”

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HERSELF Snooki in Miami Beach in April, gearing up for a new season. Credit
Jeff Daly/PictureGroup

“I remember this year going home for Christmas,” she said. “Episode 3 had just aired, with Snooki and all the drama. Every single member of my family was going, like, ‘Oh, my God,’ and I remember looking around the Christmas table and saying to myself, If a reporter were here now ... Everyone’s screaming, there’s enough food to feed four countries. All the stereotypes that people accused us of making. I’m thinking, everyone looks like that to me. Two of my uncles are in Puma sweatsuits. I have four guys named Sal at the table. I’m Sally Ann. It’s not weird to me.”

I asked Ms. Salsano about the cast members getting an attitude because of the show’s success. Last season it was the highest-rated cable show among young adults.

“Here’s what I always say: I won’t stand for it,” she said. “They all live in their mom’s basement and I know it. Last season I had to buy them cigarettes and Diet Cokes. They’re the same kids they’ve always been. Sure, they have a bit more money. They have more clothes with rhinestones on them than they did last year.”

This still doesn’t address Snooki’s strange appeal. And part of the problem is that she can’t explain it herself. She simply isn’t capable of serious introspection. She told me she has read only two books in her life, “Twilight” and “Dear John.” When we were in the kitchen at her dad’s house, I asked Snooki if she were inspired by any movie actresses. (I have this funny theory that she’s a little like Elizabeth Taylor, but more about that in a moment.)

“Movies?” she said thickly. “I really liked Brittany Murphy. Yeah. I looked up to her. She had a dorky personality, like me. It was sad that she died.”

“Yeaahh, don’t you think,” she drawled, playing with her hair. “I’m a nut job. And I don’t care.” She looked at her father.

“You are you,” he said.

As much as Professor Thompson is a fan of the show, “I certainly wouldn’t want to be stuck in an elevator with her,” he said. The fact is, Snooki is much more interesting as a character than she is in any other context. “We don’t even know how to define what Snooki is so good at,” he said. He thinks she has a “delicious artlessness,” an unprocessed quality.

The reason she makes me think of Elizabeth Taylor — quite apart from the unbridgeable divide of talent and beauty — is that photographs of Ms. Taylor in the 1960s, many of which recently ran in Vanity Fair, confirm a short, busty woman with high hair, big jewelry, garish taste in clothes and a complete indifference to the cyclonic effect that all that produced.

Of course, she is Liz. But, still ... see for yourself.

With the help of her managers, Snooki is trying to spin her image into Snooki-theme products and maybe a book, which undoubtedly she will never read, and naturally she would like to have her own reality show. But like a rare, unstable gas, she is not likely to last much beyond the moment, or to extend her effect to another medium like film. As Professor Thompson said, “Give her a script and you’ve taken away the very thing she’s good at: being herself.”